TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Apple's feedback mechanism is broken

174 pointsby goranmoominalmost 3 years ago

27 comments

ggmalmost 3 years ago
Not disagreeing, but observing Apple has a big scale problem: They sell millions, hundreds of millions of things. They are remarkably small in the clue department, so the clue density remains high (this is the MIT theory of clue: the more people you have the thinner the layer of clue has to spread until almost everyone is virtually clueless)<p>View it from their point of view: a spigot will deliver 20,000 important, believable problems to everyones desk like a mailman opening the letter-to-santa sack in December. Every desk: Which one(s) do you look at first? Note, all of them are from people of good intent, not fools. The fools are railing on bulletin boards.<p>BTW I have met Apple engineers who write things. Important things, like the TCP&#x2F;IP stack for the iPhone. There are two of them. They can&#x27;t write amazing code, and triage 20,000 bug&#x2F;improvement inputs at the same time. Sometimes, they&#x27;re at standards meeting handling fools like me.<p>Sure, there are ass-hats, but the vast bulk of the time Apple is drowning in good input, and has to triage. The example listed here probably affects 1,000 to 2,000 developers, and a critical bug probably has to affect 150,000 people to get traction.<p>or you can spend $99 and prioritize your problem.<p>I had this problem with Microsoft and X509 about 15-20 years ago, (selection of which client certificate to identify a user when there is a certificate subjectName collision) -There was precisely one expert able to fix it, I was ringfenced from them, talking to a consultant and I had the great joy of hearing how much it would cost him to even TRY to get their attention on this problem, which btw, affects the US Government, so its not like it doesn&#x27;t have &quot;scale&quot; behind it.<p>This is a problem you get, if you have hundreds of millions of customers.
评论 #31819971 未加载
评论 #31820142 未加载
评论 #31820000 未加载
评论 #31820013 未加载
peytonalmost 3 years ago
Feedback Assistant is not a support channel. It also is not a new name for Radar. You can find support channels under “Requesting Support”: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;bug-reporting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;bug-reporting&#x2F;</a><p>You are not limited to 2 technical support incidents per year. You can purchase more. I think it’s pretty fair.
评论 #31819864 未加载
评论 #31819673 未加载
steelframealmost 3 years ago
For what it&#x27;s worth, bugs that Apple engineers file inside of the company often go into the proverbial &quot;Bit Bucket.&quot; When I worked at Apple many moons ago I experienced a really horrible bug when performing a system update. I meticulously recorded all of the context and submitted it directly to the owning team. That team proceeded to ignore my bug report for over a year and then kick it back to me with, &quot;It&#x27;s been a while. Maybe it&#x27;s fixed. Try going through your repro steps again with the same hardware and let us know what happens.&quot;<p>By then I had swapped out said hardware with more recent stuff I was doing development on.<p>How many people were impacted by that bug in the meantime? No clue, but I guess it didn&#x27;t hit Apple&#x27;s bottom line hard enough to warrant anyone on the owning team even bothering to follow my repro steps themselves.
camboalmost 3 years ago
For all the hate Microsoft gets, this is one area where they&#x27;ve got it right.<p>Microsoft&#x27;s dev support framework, while not directly interacting with MS engineers (usually), the community of MVPs, Regional Directors, and even now the occasional Dev note in the opensource work MS is doing on github, has lead to a great ecosystem of support. This trickles down to Stackoverflow, the old Alt.Net crowd (and the associated .NET user groups that still persist), and the MS dev blog&#x27;o&#x27;sphere mean this type of issue is much rarer.<p>*edit: oh and I forgot the UserVoice pages, where the community can vote on issues, and they&#x27;ll get assessed by the product teams.
评论 #31820098 未加载
评论 #31820103 未加载
评论 #31819961 未加载
bumper_cropalmost 3 years ago
Independent of Apple, I think we need an industry wide of saying &quot;I&#x27;m not an idiot, this bug report is real&quot;. I&#x27;ve been on both sides (in a moderately used OSS project). The main problem is that the attending doesn&#x27;t have a good way to filtering the noise from the signal. As a result, the likes of Apple (and the other FAANGs) implement these aggregate-and-discard blackholes for bug reports. &quot;Only a 0.1% increase in crashes? Ship it&quot; is the way the story goes sadly.
评论 #31820051 未加载
评论 #31819943 未加载
评论 #31820110 未加载
评论 #31820054 未加载
评论 #31820015 未加载
评论 #31835654 未加载
Shankalmost 3 years ago
It&#x27;s definitely broken for one-off reports, but in the last beta period (for iOS&#x2F;iPadOS 15), they actually made some changes. There are user visible &quot;Resolution&quot; and &quot;Recent similar reports&quot; fields. I actually submitted a few feedbacks and saw them change from &quot;Recent similar reports: none&quot; to &quot;Recent similar reports: more than 10&quot; and then &quot;Resolution&quot; actually did change to &quot;fixed in an upcoming release of iOS&quot;. At least two feedbacks I submitted got responses to them, which actually got me an email asking for more information on one.<p>I don&#x27;t think the system is perfect by any stretch. But it definitely has improved, and Apple does read them. The catch is that for esoteric issues -- especially ones that say &quot;Recent similar reports: none&quot;, publicizing them and asking people to submit feedback if they can reproduce the issue will likely help prioritize it.<p>Esoteric crashes &#x2F;are&#x2F; harder to diagnose. Minority issues are also lower on the totem pole for any org. I don&#x27;t want to excuse Apple here -- it does suck, and it does need to keep improving, but last beta round was seriously an improvement over the past.
hericiumalmost 3 years ago
Only once I&#x27;ve got any response to Feedback. After getting it I never opened another case again.<p>Can&#x27;t recall what exactly was the issue but after macOS update, some bundled software stopped being so friendly and required more actions to achieve a goal. Some built-in functionality stopped being more useful than 3rd party products.<p>I&#x27;ve opened a case to try to tell Apple in what way their update has broken my productivity, pointed out what was needed to get results before the update and how more labor user had to do after the update.<p>Got the most Apple answer possible: &quot;this works as intended&quot;.<p>Just another example of Cook&#x27;s hostility towards users to make Apple more attractive to investors.
评论 #31843141 未加载
zaptheimpaleralmost 3 years ago
This seems better than the experience at any other big tech though. Even filing a bug is considerably harder on a Google&#x2F;Amazon product because there&#x27;s no unified Feedback Assistant app. The experience of firing a bug report off into a black hole and never knowing if&#x2F;when it was seen is universal as well.<p>It is frustrating but hardly newsworthy or a surprise.. if you feel all feedback requests should be personally investigated by devs&#x2F;PMs and replied to, maybe talk to the support teams and get a sense of the volume of these reports? It really is impossible.
评论 #31820072 未加载
评论 #31819863 未加载
simonbarker87almost 3 years ago
This is one of the main reasons I don’t develop for Apple’s platforms any more. I’d love to write Swift and leverage all the technology in their ecosystem but when you hit a wall it hits hard and you waste hours, days or weeks searching and hoping someone else hit the same issue and wrote about it.<p>Their docs are dire, their feedback system is terrible and they’ve made essentially zero improvements in the 7 years since I shipped my first app.<p>Web dev has its own frustrations but at least you can find an answer (or ten) quite quickly when you get stuck.<p>As a side note I had a play with the WeatherKit REST API for fun during WWDC this year and got totally stuck. Had a labs session with two engineers (who were great) and it turned out it was an issue with missing docs and seemingly none standard JWT signing process. Their docs (at the time) made no reference to any of this. So things really haven’t changed.
wilgalmost 3 years ago
It&#x27;s really a terrible experience. Especially since no one else can see it and simply upvote it. Instead everyone has to do the busy work all over again.
Rebelgeckoalmost 3 years ago
Last time I tried to use Feedback Assistant, it was basically impossible to report an issue with the Apple Music app on my Android phone. Scrolling was totally broken in both Chrome and Firefox, so I couldn&#x27;t scroll through the list of things to file a bug against and find the right one.<p>(I don&#x27;t know if that bug still exists because now for some reasons apple won&#x27;t let me access Feedback Assistant unless I give them the CVC from my credit card and my phone number to &quot;verify my account&quot;
ronyfadelalmost 3 years ago
I can offer some thoughts as to why this is the case:<p>- Apple engineers are literally drowning in Radars.<p>- Your F.A. Radar will arrive so late to an engineer (after being filtered by QA) that the engineer is working on new features and marks F.A. bugs as low priority.<p>- The iOS Simulator is a second class citizen.
评论 #31820106 未加载
nnurmanovalmost 3 years ago
Not only Apple, I send this email to EU Commissioner,<p>I heard numerous cases when FB support completely ignored cases. There is even a post on Reddit of a guy, who managed to resolve his case by buying an Oculus gadget. Just today I heard a case with Upwork. I am trying to understand here, what is this? A corporate policy? A resource shortage? When you buy a car and it is broken, you can go to court and seek resolution there, but when you have a social account with a large user base or an Upwork account that brings money, where do you go?<p>Shouldn’t companies have a standard flows to support people? Would you as EU impose some rules?
hamburglaralmost 3 years ago
I’ve had the same experience reporting bugs every single time. You never ever get a response and simple bugs languish for literal years with no action. Eventually, they sometimes get fixed after years and you wonder if your report had any connection to it whatsoever. It definitely adds to the “Apple doesn’t give a damn about users or software quality” impression I have gotten more and more over the years
michelbalmost 3 years ago
I think Apple pushes out whatever is on their internal roadmap, and if it works for most of the users, it&#x27;s fine. If not a serious issue, it may never be fixed.<p>There are somewhat serious&#x2F;annoying issues that have been there for multiple years but are mostly relevant for power users, or issues that do not contribute to the bottom line, and thus will never be fixed.<p>Even if their own apps do not work together nicely, tough luck.<p>Hope that your issues will be fixed in the next major OS release.<p>I think that it is a problem with their mode of operating and the fact that fixing the majority of bugs will take longer than pushing out a v1 of a new product or service.<p>Also, fixing these bugs will probably mean that teams have to talk to each other, and I really have no idea if that is a reality at Apple. Given the last few software releases it doesn&#x27;t seem that way.<p>I have a bunch of issues with Monterey that, while some are VERY annoying, do not prevent me from being productive. I also have zero expectation they will be fixed.
zionicalmost 3 years ago
No shit.<p>Fun fact: 3 major releases of TvOS have functioned such that if you navigate to App Store&#x2F;search and hit siri “Xyz app” Siri (global) appears and tries to take you to said app.<p>If you want to use <i>dictation</i>, you must swipe down and select the text input field. You know, because navigation to search wasn’t enough context.
Aqua_Geekalmost 3 years ago
My laptop somehow overwrote its primary disk encryption keys (i.e. It basically crypto-shredded all my data). I filed an issue with Apple and was met with radio silence for a year. The response that came back was effectively, “do you still have that device, and is it still broken?”
rvdlalmost 3 years ago
Does anyone have any ideas on how Apple could solve this, without just hiring thousands of people? What process or system could be used to triage and reply to tens of thousands of these types of tickets without a corresponding linear increase in staff?
评论 #31822328 未加载
评论 #31821594 未加载
评论 #31821757 未加载
lastlineXalmost 3 years ago
I reported `&#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;CLANG` odd behavior on case-sensitive data volume due to case-insensitive system volume on Mac OS X. Then they replied with &quot;Work as expected; No plans to make the system volume case-sensitive&quot;.
boxedalmost 3 years ago
There is something worse than what Casey experienced.<p>I filed a feedback on the Contacts API that you can&#x27;t add a piece of information to a contact card. Literally. You can only read the entire card, set stuff on it (not ALL the stuff, just some random subset!) and then write it. What happens to all the data you can&#x27;t set and can&#x27;t read?<p>REMOVED<p>This means their Contacts API, if used to add any information, leads to data loss.<p>The reply? &quot;Works as designed&quot;. I explained to them that this is catastrophic data loss and that how it was designed isn&#x27;t really relevant. Still got &quot;works as designed&quot;.
评论 #31820632 未加载
评论 #31819786 未加载
RyJonesalmost 3 years ago
He&#x27;s right. I submitted a radar[0] in the Xcode toolchain with a very simple repro and it was never acted on - a compile would fail with an error when there was none. It killed our CI system.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;ryjones&#x2F;3e9a851e92794d67b5e37197608a5f18" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;ryjones&#x2F;3e9a851e92794d67b5e37197608a...</a>
评论 #31820461 未加载
saagarjhaalmost 3 years ago
The best way to file feedback is to 1. file a good report in Feedback Assistant, then 2. tweet about it. The second step is <i>crucial</i>.
irjustinalmost 3 years ago
Apple&#x27;s true feedback mechanism seems to be class action lawsuits.<p>It&#x27;s the only time I&#x27;ve seen consistent change&#x2F;response.
worikalmost 3 years ago
&quot;Documentation that, um, exists; and when it exists, it shouldn’t suck.&quot;<p>Wouldn&#x27;t that be nice!<p>I recently moved from Swift&#x2F;SwiftUI to Dart&#x2F;Flutter in my professional life.<p>My hobby times I spend in Rust.<p>Of the three only Rust documentation has code snippets with the standard library documentation.<p>Apple, Google: Bigger than big, why not even try?
speedyapocalmost 3 years ago
I’ve rarely had my Radars receive any attention unless they were coupled with a TSI. Probably makes sense based on the volume of bug reports that Apple likely receives.<p>The ones that were accompanied with a TSI received attention in 1-3 weeks which seems pretty quick.
whatever1almost 3 years ago
Apple does not need active feedback mechanism. It just needs a list of gotchas to avoid for their next generation of products. Their customers of previous products can go f off or buy the new products.
jmbwellalmost 3 years ago
It sounds like the same guy who had the workaround also believed using a TSI might have been worthwhile.<p>I see no reason to take his guidance on one point and not the other.